X-Message-Number: 29290
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Re: Mark's lack of a future. 
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:10:19 -0800

In Cryonet #29261, Perry Metzger came out from under his bridge to write,

>About your "no one is doing anything", Mark: right now VC spending on 
>energy is on the order of tens of billions of dollars, though a few years 
>ago it was a tiny fraction of that. I have friends at some of the largest 
>VCs in the country, and they're all sending heavily on energy right now.

The same kinds of people who also gave us the dot-com and real estate 
bubbles? I can almost guarantee that these venture capitalists have invested 
into nonobvious perpetual motion machines instead of real sources of net 
energy, with a depressingly familiar collapse of asset values to follow in a 
few years. Even within the oil industry, investment has doubled in recent 
years but output has stayed flat. (Refer to my other post about Matthew 
Simmons.)

>Further, you keep saying things like "ah, with all these advances, what 
>good has happened for health care!" -- and you say this even as cancer 
>deaths are falling for the first time, as life expectancy continues to 
>climb, and as new medical treatments with real benefits keep pouring out of 
>the lab faster than we can absorb them.  I have friends who are alive today 
>because of treatments that didn't even exist ten years ago. The rate of 
>medical innovation is astonishingly high, though all we hear from you is 
>how sucky things are. In your world, statins don't exist, gleevec doesn't 
>exist, the myriad of antiviral medicines developed in just the last ten 
>years don't exist. In your world, medically induced comas don't save 
>cerebrovascular injury patients, artemesin isn't treating malaria, 
>researchers haven't cured Alzheimers in test animals. I don't know where 
>your world is, but it certainly isn't Earth, because here, the biomedical 
>news comes out so fast that I can no longer keep up with the journals.

In my world, and in the world of the highly regarded economist and Extropian 
sympathizer Robin Hanson, at least half of the healthcare we consume doesn't 
do a thing for health and longevity; we invest resources into it any way 
almost like a cargo cult:

Fear of Death and Muddled Thinking   It Is So Much Worse Than You Think
http://hanson.gmu.edu/feardie.pdf

Robin points out that the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940's and 
1950's didn't even produce a blip in death rates, which continued to decline 
smoothly over those decades for reasons other than because of "progress" in 
medicine. I suspect today's over-hyped "wonder" drugs and treatments don't 
cause dramatic differences, either. Sure, some sociological groups now live 
longer, but we don't really know the reasons. Why, for example, do the 
Japanese enjoy the high end of the world's health and longevity even though 
they have the fourth-highest per capita consumption of cigarettes (and 
unfiltered ones at that, from what I've heard)? You might want to look up 
and absorb the implications of "confirmation bias" before you rely on 
personal anecdotes about people "saved" by modern medicine. People who 
defend the effiicacy of dowsing from their own experience make similar 
errors in inferencing.

The existence of the world's documented "supercentenarians" (people who live 
to at least 110 years of age) also trashes a LOT of the current 
pseudoscience and quackery about "life extension." First of all, most of the 
ones I've read about lived their lives in poverty (black sharecroppers in 
the South and the like), so that immediately rules out expensive medical 
interventions to account for their longevity. And two, they did almost none 
of the things advocated by the likes of medical "futurists" like Kurzweil, 
for example, swallowing bowls of vitamin and antioxidant pills every day. 
Maybe they benefitted from involuntary caloric restriction because they 
literally lacked sufficient income to buy all the food they wanted. But they 
probably got to extreme ages (by current standards) from a combination of 
accidents like inheriting certain genes, suffering from a low initial damage 
load in their mothers' wombs and benefitting from some other factors we 
don't understand yet.

If I personally make it the year 2030, I expect that some people alive then 
will repeat my ongoing exercise with 1970's "futurists." They will dig out 
the stuff written in the 1990-2010 era by Extropians and transhumanists 
about an imminent "singularity," compare that with their less than 
transhuman reality, and exclaim, "What the hell were they thinking back 
then?" I know what "they" thought, because I contributed a tiny share of it. 
Ray Kurzweil in "The Singularity Is Near" credits me on page 498 with 
coining the word "singularitarian."

Mark Plus

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